wu ming yi the man with the compound eyes

N2 - Sterk translates the literary work 'The man with the compound eyes' 《複眼人》, written by Wu Ming-Yi (吳明益).

T1 - The man with the compound eyes : a novel On their journey, memories will be challenged, an unusual bond formed, and a dark secret uncovered that will force Alice to question everything she thought she knew.', The elements of magical realism are wonderfully woven in, creating a storyline which both surprises and excites.Abstract = 'Sterk translates the literary work s disappearance. The Man with the Compound Eyes is a delectably rich novel, both in terms of its minute details and its prose, which has been both marvellously written and translated. It is also worth mentioning that Vintage have clearly put a lot of thought into the aesthetics of the novel the cover has been beautifully designed, and decorative beehive-style pages break up each of the sections. The Man with the Compound Eyes has been translated by Darryl Sterk, who has taken such care over the original material, and has rendered it into an incredibly readable work. The scene which he sets is sumptuous, and the community which inhabits it believable: ‘The people of Wayo Wayo thought the whole world was but a single island… Nobody had ever left and brought back news of another land’.

Throughout, Ming-Yi notices such small details about the world which he has crafted, from hidden spiderwebs to his descriptions of creatures. The Man with the Compound Eyes has been beautifully written, and one of the real strengths which it holds is the way in which Ming-Yi personifies nature from the very beginning: ‘The trickling of water through the fissures in the subterranean rock was suddenly drowned out when the mountain made an immense but also somehow distant sound’. Without giving too much of the tale away, the premise of the novel is thus: on an island, somewhere far away from the mainland and prying eyes, every single second son must leave the shores as soon as he turns fifteen, in order to provide the fiercely believed in sea god with a sacrifice. As one may therefore expect, The Man with the Compound Eyes has been very well received in the United Kingdom author Hugh Howey calls it ‘a haunting and evocative tale’, and the Independent on Sunday declare it ‘Frankly astonishing… A wonderful novel which deserves a very wide audience’. Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes, the first of the author’s novels to be translated into English, has been marketed as a Taiwanese Life of Pi – a high accolade indeed.

Wu ming yi the man with the compound eyes